COPYRIGHT NOTICE

Some still and moving images on this website have been sourced from various films. No profit is made from the Film Qlub. No infringement of copyright is intended. Our logo is an original design. We request that you contact us before reproducing it.

The written contents of this website are originalmaterial created by/for the Dublin Film Qlub.Feel free to use the written material on our website, but we request that you acknowledge the source.

Navigation

Navigation

Satyricon. 12 November 2016. 2:30pm

=adaptation of Satyricon, a novel by Petronius, written in the year 65=

Italian with English subtitles

cast: Martin Potter, Hiram Keller

“Assemble here, you wanton sodomites,

Drive yourselves forward, let your feet take wing.

Full speed ahead. Come now with pliant thighs,

And mincing buttocks, fingers gesturing.

Come, tender youths, and you in later life,

And lads castrated by the Delian knife!

Petronius, Satyricon (year 65)

The film Satyricon is an adaptation of a novel of the same name by Petronius,
probably written in the year 65. Only fragments of the text have survived, less
than 1/5 of the original at best. Most of the fragments deal with the
adventures of the ‘knave errant’ Encolpius and his lover, the slave Giton, who
has an eye on a new boyfriend, Ascyltus. Another surviving fragment deals with
an evening of feasting and debauchery in the house of nouveau-rich Trimalchio.
To these two strands, the Satyricon scriptwriters
added tales and images from other classical Roman texts, and some of the most
memorable scenes in the film (the earthquake, the minotaur), in fact do not
come from Petronius.

It seems that the original story included the hero’s
seduction of various women, but the surviving text, and the film adaptation,
are consistently and ostentatiously concerned with male homosexuality. Whether
heterosexual director Federico Fellini was staging a fantasy of gayness or not,
his film certainly helped to create the ‘gay camp decadent look’ in the movies. Fellini’s Satyricon has an aesthetic of gilded excess,
a languid tempo, and a narrative of loosely-connected moments hovering between pleasure
and danger. Unexpectedly, the book (but not the film) is full of sexual assault
and rape between men, often described as irrelevant or ambiguous, while the
film (but not the book) presents women as base lumps of flesh, which only exist
to please or aggravate men. Was the
writer Petronius an outraged citizen denouncing the moral dereliction of the
rich in his time? Or was he celebrating an amoral new order where indulgence
rules? We don’t know. As for Fellini, it’s celebration all the way.